People live their lives on social media, whether that is sharing a picture of your dinner last night, a cute baby video or a general update for your followers.

However, some other people also use it for other uncommon reasons – including finding out who your ex is now dating, where your friends have gone out for the evening without you or even 'sexting'.

Things like that make people panic when their mobile phone falls into the wrong hands as, let’s face it, you wouldn't want your mother to see the messages you sent to the girl you met at the club last weekend.

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There are actually a number of different things that you can do to keep your social media clean and tidy so that anyone using your phone cannot see what you’ve been searching or sending to people privately.

The most common way to find someone on Twitter is to use the ‘Twitter Searches’ option, where you type in the name of the person or business you are looking for and all the people with matching words in their Twitter handles are listed.

‘Twitter Searches’ saves the information for your most recent 25 searches, but you can easily delete this history on both desktop and mobile.

First, click the magnifying glass icon at the bottom of the screen

To do this on desktop, navigate to Twitter in your web browser and log in to your account, before clicking the search box in the top right hand corner of the page and clicking ‘Clear All’.

On your smartphone, it is just as simple. Log into your account and click the magnifying glass icon at the bottom of the screen. It should load up the local trends and moments, but if you click in the ‘Search Twitter’ box at the top, you’ll see a small grey ‘X’ in the top right of your screen. Click that and your search history will be deleted.

‘Twitter Searches’ history isn’t the only thing that you can actually delete on Twitter though, as there are also digital ways of bulk deleting tweets and direct messages – although to do this, you have to log in to a third-party website where your account information may not be 100% secure.

Clicking 'Search Twitter' will load up a small X in the top right of the screen

Unsurprisingly though, the easiest way to delete Twitter history is to close the account and start a new one.

To do this, click on your icon and find your account settings area, which will then display an option to ‘Deactivate your account’. Once you click the option, you’ll have to read some information and type in your password for the request for deactivation can be sent.

Twitter will retain your user data for 30 days, in which you can log on at any point to reactivate, before your account will be completely erased from the servers.

Finally, press the clear option to remove your recent search history

On Instagram, it is a similarly simple process to delete your search history. Load your profile screen and click the settings icon next to under the amount of people you are following, which takes you to the options screen. There you'll find the option for 'Clear Search History' when you scroll down.

As for Facebook on mobile, click in the search box at the top of the screen and find the small 'edit' button on the top right of the screen. That will take you to your activity log, where you'll easily find the option to 'Clear Searches'.